Resumen de Space, Time, Desire, and the Atlantic in Three Spanish Films of the 1920s

Andrew Ginger

• Beyond the confines of High Modernism, the Modernist Period can be understood as a wider reconfiguration of space and time, both as regards modes of representation and the experience of cultural space. In the new medium of cinema, these two facets of change are seen both in the formal structure of films, and in the reorientation of questions about national and transnational self-understanding towards preoccupations about the far side of the North Atlantic, from which commercially successful cinema increasingly emanated. This article considers three films from the Spain of the 1920s all of which explore a problematic continuity between the experience of Spanish and North American cultural space, crystallized in the medium of cinema itself. In considering this problematic continuity, the films make clear that the key question for the future of national boundaries lies in establishing acceptable models of gender and desire that will govern cinematic cultural space.